Neither the feeling nor the style of Miss Dickinson belongs to the seventeenth century; yet between her and Donne there are remark...able ties. Their religious ideas, their abstractions, are momently toppling from the rational plane to the level of perception. The ideas, in fact, are no longer the impersonal religious symbols created anew in the heat of emotion, that we find in poets like Herbert and Vaughan. They have become, for Donne, the terms of personality; they are mingled with the miscellany of sensation. In Miss Dickinson, as in Donne, we may detect a singularly morbid concern, not for religious truth, but for personal revelation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there was a great deal of invention in Whitman's revolutionary work, he built upon a foundation that was already clear, d...irect, available, and acceptable: the ordinary language of the "common man," the working man and laborer--the man of the street. Whitman transformed the language with which he began, but he had something to begin with. Dickinson would have found Whitman's call for a "common" language in poetry entirely congenial--even, perhaps, compelling--for he gave formal utterance to many attitudes that lie behind her work; however, she faced a serious challenge in attempting to implement such a proposal. "Direct" language in a woman was always "domestic" language: there were no women of the street (save for prostitutes), no workingwomen or women laborers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[W]e are all guilty in some Measure of the same narrow way of Thinking ... when we fancy the Customs, Dresses, and Manners of othe...r Countries are ridiculous and extravagant, if they do not resemble those of our own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An illustrious individual remarks that Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton is the salt, Anna Dickinson the pepper, and Miss [Susan B.] A...nthony the vinegar of the Female Suffrage movement. The very elements get the "white male" into a nice pickle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davi...es, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,--he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, "Look, my Lord, it comes" ... Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I come from."M"From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expense of my country.... [W]ith that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression "come from Scotland," which I used in the sense of being of that country, and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have grown so tired of Woman with a capital W, though I suppose it is rankest heresy to say so. I don't want to be Woman at all-...-I have begun to feel that I want to be something like this--WO--Aââ¬â.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »